Jesus Christ, God Incarnate

Text: Hebrews 2:10-18

After the prayers of the people today in the middle of worship, we will say “Into your hands, God of grace, we commend all for whom we pray, trusting in your mercy, through Jesus Christ, God incarnate.” That last little bit is a somewhat unusual, non-standard. In the rule books, this prayer does not end with “God incarnate.” In the books, it ends with “Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Maybe all these Sundays you have been thinking, why does he say “God incarnate”? Why doesn’t he say it the right way?

When we pray the prayers of the people, we pray in the name of Jesus. That is what Jesus taught us to do. Ask for what you want in my name, he said. Praying in the name of Jesus is like invoking a friend’s name when you want the force of your friend to give weight and authority to your words. You might be looking for a job, and you get this lead from your friend Michelle. You call the lead: “Hi. Michelle suggested I call you.” He knows Michelle, so he pays attention to you. Or on the other hand, you might be acting as an agent: “Hi, I’m calling at the request of Mayor Menino of Boston. He’d like to meet with you.” It’s a kind of official name dropping.

When you pray in the name of Jesus, you are saying, “Hi, Jesus suggested I get in touch. Jesus said I should call you.” If we end the prayers with “Jesus Christ, our Lord,” we are doing more like the Mayor Menino thing. Our connection is sort of official. But when we end with “Jesus Christ, God incarnate,” we are invoking the name of Jesus more as our friend than as our boss.

What we are trusting here is that Jesus knows us. He knows what it is like to be a human being, with all the joys and sorrows of human existence. Our prayers during this time in worship are things we desire or celebrate as humans. Human wants and longings and gratitude. That someone get well, that someone be comforted, that someone be safe, that someone be happy at a birth, a birthday, a success after hard work, a break. Someone. Some one. Some human person.

In one sense, what’s the big deal that Jesus was a person? For many people in the world, that’s all that Jesus was. A good, wise, surprising, charismatic, radical, radically compassionate, healing person. For those people, the issue is Jesus’ divinity, not his humanity. That makes sense, I suppose. There are, after all, more examples of good humans in the world than there are of divine humans. But even if it makes sense, that has not been how Christians have thought for the past twenty centuries, or at least the past nineteen. Once things settled down after a few initial heresies, Christians have been historically more likely to deny the humanity of Jesus and to take his divinity as given. Certainly in the passage from the book of Hebrews, from which we just heard, that is the issue.

The book of Hebrews has what is called in church jargon “high Christology.” What that means is that in this book Jesus is portrayed as God, eternal and of all time, from the beginning of the world to the end. But Jesus became for a while a person. “For a little while,” it says, he was “made lower than the angels.” That means us, made like us. In Hebrews, Jesus’ godly nature goes without saying. But the book makes a special effort to convince us of his human nature.

He is like us in every respect, it says. He is a brother to us. We are his brothers and sisters. We share the same parent. We share in being creatures made of blood and flesh. For some people, this fleshiness of Jesus gives them the creeps. After all, we know well the things people do that are not so good. We get into some pretty bad stuff, some unpleasant situations, some grimy spots from time to time. How can we say that our God is like us in every way when there is a lot in ourselves that we do not respect at all. Some do not want a God who is human in every way.

Besides, Jesus is made to suffer. In Hebrews, this is the clincher. It was his suffering that proved him to be human. He did not hide behind his divinity and avoid the tough and painful things that people do. Like, for example, being executed. “Why don’t you save yourself,” the people asked Jesus on the cross. But if he had, he would not have been human. Humans don’t get those kind of options. When it says that Jesus is made perfect in sufferings, it does not mean that he is made morally pure through the suffering of himself or others. It does not mean that it is good to suffer. Or that Jesus liked to suffer. It means that Jesus suffered just like all people do. People suffer. Jesus could not be a complete person without suffering. Jesus did not seek suffering, but he was bound to suffer because he was completely a person. Like us in every respect.

By being just like us, there is a sense in which Jesus is more than God. I’m not sure quite how to talk about this. Jesus is God. That’s what the Trinity means. What Jesus does, God does. There is no way in our theology that Jesus can be more than God. What I really mean is more useful, more connected to us. That is still theologically a problem. But, as Hebrews argues—and as I think we often feel—because Jesus was a human, he is closer to us. He knows us better. “He had to become like his brothers and sisters,” says Hebrews, so that he could be more merciful and more effective “in the service of God,” as it says. When God became human in Jesus, God learned something that God did not already know. God learned in a way that before God had not: what it is like to be human. To love and to suffer as a person does.

God as Jesus knows us in a different way. Jesus weeps for his friend Lazarus, his heart aches when he sees people ill, he gets angry at scumbags and oppressors. Jesus is able to say about his executioners, as he is dying, “forgive them,” because he knows how easily people are caught in a mesh of fear and greed and ignorance.

Jesus is human-sized. He knows how big the ocean seems, he knows how powerless we feel and also sometimes how unreasonably powerful. He knows how long it takes to walk from Jerusalem to Nazareth.

And above all he knows death. He knows how it feels to face death. He knows how scary that is. He knows how much the fear of death ransacks our lives. How it tears through our fragile freedom and peace of mind and peace of the world. Makes us less compassionate, makes us fill barns with more goods so we’ll always have enough, makes us hold on to things and familiar systems, makes us fastidious and obsessed. The fear of death and its less-permanent cousins makes us afraid to live. So we are slaves to death, Hebrews says. In a way that Hebrews does not detail, Jesus destroys the power of death and frees those who are enslaved by fear.

To say, to feel, “Jesus is with me” is somehow different than to say “God is with me.” God is with us because it is God’s job, God’s nature. But Jesus is with us, so it can seem, because Jesus is family. Jesus is kin. Jesus is our brother. We can call on Jesus because we are related by the demands of kinship. Jesus speaks for us because he is us.

We pray prayers of concern and celebration. We pray in confidence because we know that Jesus speaks our language—the language of human life—without translation. Our longings are not trivial, our fears not phony, our celebrations not foolish. We know that God has more than an academic, a political, a cosmic understanding of us. Because God lives here. Jesus Christ, God incarnate.

Light Before Christmas

Text: Matthew 1:18-25
Other texts: Isaiah 7:10-16

As signs go, it was not much.

A child born of a young woman. As if that didn’t happen every day. A son, too. Odds of that happening were what: one out of two? Not exactly improbable. And his name was Immanuel.

Ahaz, king of Judah, was not looking for a sign. So he said. I’m not going to ask for any old sign, so said Ahaz. I would not ask for a sign from God, he says. Yet even so, he gets a sign. And he welcomes the sign. Ahaz is in a little trouble politically and militarily. He is concerned about an alliance from the north. And the sign of Immanuel points to good news in the end. The king has nothing to fear from his enemies. At least in the short term.

The birth of Jesus is as much a sign as an event. It is a sign of things to come, a sign of God’s eagerness to be part of the world, a sign of God’s hopes and plans.

When we recall the story of the birth of Jesus, we mostly remember the story from the Gospel of Luke (and we’ll hear that version tomorrow, Christmas Eve). But in this year and on this day, still in Advent, we hear the version from Matthew. (There is no birth story in Mark or John, which is interesting in itself.)

In Matthew, the birth of Jesus is a grammatical afterthought. If it portends great things, it is not very portentous. It is in a subordinate clause in a sentence that refers to what Joseph is doing, and in fact the whole passage is mostly about Joseph. Joseph is going to treat Mary honorably, Joseph has a dream, Joseph is comforted by the angel, Joseph is the son of the line of David, Joseph names his son Jesus. “Joseph had no martial relations with Mary until she had borne a son,” it says. That’s the birth story of Jesus in Matthew.

For Luke, the birth of Jesus is a performance. Very suitable to Christmas pageants. For Matthew, the birth is a sign. In Luke, Jesus is welcomed by shepherds and priests. But in Matthew, Jesus and his family have to flee in fear to Egypt to escape from evil King Herod. In Luke, Herod is not part of Jesus birth story at all. But in Matthew, Herod reads the signs. Herod knows that the birth of Jesus is a sign of a new world order, a sign that the days of Herod and his type and his cronies are numbered.

We, like those who lived in the time of Jesus, like people of every time and place, walk in worry and apprehension. Times are dark. We walk in darkness. We look for a sign that the future will not be the same as the past. We hardly know where we are, we cannot see where we are going, and do not know how get there. We look for a light to give us direction and also to illuminate the path ahead so that we do not stumble. We look for light at the end of the tunnel and also the light inside the tunnel, where we are walking.

At Christmas, we proclaim that Jesus is that light. I am the light, Jesus says. In Baptism, like the Baptism of Alec today, we pray that the light of Jesus shines in us so that other people might see it. May your light so shine, we said to Alec, that others may see.

Here in worship the light signs are everywhere. Santa Lucia is a celebration of light, Lucy walks with candles in her crown, we give a lighted candle to Alec (or to his responsible adults; he’s a little small yet), we light all four candles on the Advent wreath, we light all these [aisle] candles.

We are not quite at Christmas, in spite of the poinsettias and tree and this teaser Gospel story. We are still in Advent. And Advent is more than anything a time of looking. Looking hard, at ourselves and the world and God’s promises. At the beginning of Advent, looking back. And now, almost at the end, looking forward. We are tired of dark days and dark times. We look hard to find the light. Unlike Ahaz, we are looking for a sign, looking hard.

In both Luke and Matthew the birth of Jesus is a sign. In Luke it is a sign like a big billboard, something broadcast by Clear Channel Communications. In Matthew, the birth of Jesus is like a street sign in Boston, hardly visible.

But in both stories, the sign is there: Jesus is coming to change the world. Watch out, world. Watch out. The message of Advent is this: The days of the ways of darkness are numbered. There is a new way to be. Jesus shows us. The light shines. The light shines and the darkness will not overcome it.

Peace in the Kingdom

Text: Matthew 3:1-12
Other texts: Isaiah 11:1-8

There is a measuring device out on the street next to the church, down on Tremont Street. The device is called the Discontent-O-Meter. It measures anxiety. It measures how worried people are about the state of the world. It works through trash. If there are hardly any scratch tickets, empty pints, or styrofoam coffee cups in the gutter or on the sidewalk, then things are pretty good. People are feeling more or less OK. But if the street is littered from end to end, and little nips are stashed in the flower pots, then things are tough. I read the Discontent-O-Meter every day as I walk between my house and the church. Right now, things are tough. And have been for a while.

John the Baptizer preaches about repentance. Repent, he says, for the kingdom of God has come near. He takes people down to the river, where they confess their sins. It is hard to tell exactly what happens to those people next. The baptism of John resembled a rite of conversion. People were changed by it. Baptism both cleansed people of the old and initiated them into something new. What was new for them was not, it seems, a kind of restored soul. What was new was that they had become partners, or agents, or members, or citizens, of the kingdom of God. Which was near, though not entirely here.

The nature of the kingdom of God would have been clear to the crowds that gathered around John in the desert. It would have be a realm of this world. But in God’s kingdom, the poor are not abandoned, one nation does not occupy another as Rome had, the powerful leaders of the church and state do not strut around in fancy outfits while the people wear rags, the many do not starve while a few feast. Pretty much what you would expect. What we pray for every day here.

When the Pharisees and Sadducees come to John to be baptized, he calls them the brood of vipers. Children of snakes. Not because they are individually bad folks—maybe they are, but probably not, just regular folks in power—but because as a group they have not been welcoming of God’s kingdom. What have they as a group done to even things up between people on the outs and the people who are in? Will they repent? That is, will they turn to a new kind of life? Will they change their ways? It sounds like John does not think so. They come for show and perhaps for solace, but they probably do not come looking to be empowered to change the world. They are not discontent.

What we hope for in the kingdom of God is food, shelter, care, compassion, fellowship, fairness, and all the blessings of life. Those are the things that we can do something about, and the prophets have told us for millennia that God calls us to do something about them.

But what we long for most in the kingdom of God is peace. Peace is the sign, peace is the marker, peace is the reward of God’s kingdom.

People walk down Tremont Street with a lot on their minds. An appointment, a family problem, some issue at work, how to make ends meet, how to be safe, whether to buy something, how their clothes feel, where they’ll be next year, sorrow at some recent loss. These things occupy the front of their minds. Each day there is something new to ponder about. But I think that in the back of their minds, in the hidden and dark, deep anxious thoughts, in the constant background, is war. War today and the threat of war tomorrow and the sorrow of war in the past.

There are people today who remember World War II and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and the Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan and the War in Iraq. Plus the first Arab Israeli War and the Suez War and the Six Day war and the Yom Kippur War. Plus the Russian war in Afghanistan and the war in the Balkans and the war in Somalia and the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia and the war in Rwanda.

For over half of my life the U.S. has been actively at war. And in every year in the life of each of us here, somewhere in the world there has been active fighting, destruction, and death from war. There has not been a single year in any of our lives in which the world has been at peace. War is not new.

Maybe this is old hat. Everyone knows that wars go on always. But if it is old hat, it is a sad old hat, one that ought to be retired. Each day that war rages makes us more tired. Moves us high on the Discontent-O-Meter. It is a worldwide discouragement.

It is not meant to be. It is not what God has in mind. The design of the world is for peace. The story of creation in Genesis is a story of creaturely harmony and peace. The story of the fall is the story of the world broken. The prophecy that we just heard in Isaiah is the promise of a world restored. It is a radical promise. A time of unending peace is so strange that it will be as if natural enemies—leopard and lamb, lion and calf—will live together. As if predators never preyed on the young and weak. As if our fears for ourselves and those we love had no basis.

We might pray, as I think John the Baptizer must have and that people who came to him must have, that the oppressors become the oppressed. We might pray for victory of the righteous over the unrighteous. We might hope that the lion and the calf switch places, and pray that the lamb puts fear in the heart of the leopard. That would be a change. Sort of.

But I don’t think it would do much for reducing the reading on the Discontent-O-Meter. We think sometimes that what we want is victory, when what we really long for is the end to all battles.

If the kingdom of God is near, we are all in this together. Can just one of us be healed while all the rest are broken? Can just one of us be comforted while the rest suffer? The notion that John likes, that some are wheat while the rest are chaff, is not born out by the actions of Jesus nor by our own experience. We are each of us a little wheat and a little chaff. I speak, at least, for myself.

Even so, we could pretend that we know who is wheat and chaff. We could pretend that is is we who are authorized to separate the wheat from the chaff. We certainly have tried that tactic over and over again. People did that long before Jesus was born and sadly, have continued to do it long after he was crucified. But the results do not seem so great. It has not done much for the state of the world.

Things are not so good so far, as my son used to say. It is not good for the people who walk down Tremont Street, it is not good for you, to live in a world in unending battle. It drives us crazy and sad and moves each of us up on the Discontent-O-Meter. I bet it moves God up on that scale, too.

Advent is a time for reconsideration, which is another word for repentance. I’m not saying this is simple. But maybe it is time to consider. Jesus, the one we follow, did preach another way to live. He came to heal the world, he said, and in doing so to heal that part in our minds in which resides dark sorrow. And replace it with the light of God’s kingdom.

Separation. Reconciliation.

Text: Matthew 24:36-44 Other texts: Romans 13:11-14

Separation. Reconciliation.

Separation and reconciliation. They make the world go ‘round. Literally. Our planet longs to move on in a straight line, free from the sun. Without the sun, that’s just what it would do. But the sun pulls it back, every second the sun pulls the earth away from its headstrong straight-ahead path, and therefore the earth circles the sun. Even though its momentum seeks independence, it is grateful for its constant reconciliation with the sun. For without that, there is no life here. No us. No Advent.

In a similar way the electrons circle the core of the atom, allowing large things to form like people and churches. And inside those cores, quarks circle each other. This is not a permanent condition. Particles break loose from time to time. Good thing they do, or there would be no energy for life or electricity or much else. But in the short term, at least, things do not fall apart, the center does hold, we have a world that exists long enough for us to be grateful for it.

It is not just physics. Children orbit their parents, then run away to the playroom, the playground, the playing fields, in widening curves. And then return for comfort, hope, safety, peace. Lovers circle one another, binary stars. They drift away, run away, or are pulled away by other callings, to work or war or wondering about the green pastures on the other side of the fence, and then if lucky are drawn back to one another in a partial unity that is both fragile and rugged.

We are not permanent creatures. In the last few months at Faith we have had a bushel of births and deaths. We come and go. Together and not.

Separation is inevitable. So when Jesus speaks about two women, one taken and one left, that is not remarkable in any way. That’s life. Ordinary life. Matthew wants to show Jesus talking about a remarkable time, the end time. Matthew, like his contemporaries, was interested in the end of the world. Because, among other things, the world for them was not so great. Jesus lived on this earth in a time when the end of time seemed welcome, the separation of all of us, or some of us, from this worldly world. And a reconciliation, at the same time, of people with God, with God’s love, living in a unity with others and with God that would be more close than the closest lovers. A new place and time.

Two will be in the field, but one will be taken and one left. That is the way of things. We do not have to conjure up some sort of cosmic dislocation for that to happen. It happens all the time. In the simplest ways. Friends move away. Or we do. Spouses or partners part. Children grow up and move on. Interests change. People get sick and out of the loop. People leave us through death.

It is the way of things, but it is not what we want. We want to be close to one another. To not fight and quarrel and do battle. To not be estranged and awkward and at odds. To not be lonely. To not be hateful to others. To have no love unrequited. We want reconciliation.

We want this for ourselves, our individual selves, in our own lives with our own families and friends and colleagues, even, and neighbors.

We want this for our world, for the nations and peoples of the world.

We want this for us and God.

The story of God and humans is a story of separation and reconciliation. In the days of Noah, as Jesus says. God gives up on humans, washing them and creatures all away, then in the end saves them after all. Isaiah tells Israel that it and God are estranged, but in the end the two are back together again. We get angry at God and, it seems, God at us. But never for long, and never forever.

Imagine the disciples living at the time when Matthew’s Gospel was written, long after Jesus had died and been raised up. Imagine how frightened, sad, and hopeful they must have been. Imagine how desperately they must have wanted Jesus back, as desperately as we want an old friend back, as desperately as someone who has lost the one who gives one’s life meaning, as desperately as one who is left behind.

In Advent we long for the coming of Christ and the re-coming of Christ. It is an emotionally complicated time. We anticipate separation and reconciliation. The coming of Jesus at Christmas and the return of Jesus—who knows when. No one knows, Jesus says. The mystery of faith, we say in the prayer of thanksgiving: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.

Some find the end-of-the-world stuff creepy. Especially in these days when people write about it with such glee and triumphalism. But the separation we hear about in this story is not the point of the story. That is the context of it, the sorrow of it. No one hearing this story would have been pleased by hearing that in the field one will be taken and one left. That is not a good thing. That is just plain sad.

What is a good thing is that we continue to expect in some time to find hope, peace, joy, and love. That the son pulls us back around. That we expect in some time to be reconciled to one another, all of us, all people, all peoples, and that we expect to be reconciled with God.

Advent is a time for reflection on our life now and on what might come into our lives in the future. It not a time for us to be either gloomy or self-righteous. Put aside the works of darkness, the apostle Paul says, and put on the armor of light. In these weeks ahead, be with God. And be with one another.